Amazon Web Services (AWS) is on fire being a leader in the industry and with companies like Netflix committing to AWS, they look like the perfect cloud computing environment to many. For over a year I’ve heard of many though who are looking to move out of AWS as they run into performance problems.

Reddit Ties Outage to Amazon Performance

March 18th, 2011 : Rich Miller

UPDATE: Reddit has now updated its post from saying that it “been working to completely move Cassandra off EBS and onto local storage” to say that it is moving Cassandra “off of EBS and onto the local storage which is directly attached to the EC2 instances.” We have updated out post to reflect that Reddit has not reduced its use of AWS, but only the way it deploys resources on it.

The social news siteReddit is revising how it uses Amazon’s cloud computing service following performance problems that contributed to six hours of downtime for the Reddit site this week. The Reddit operations team attributed the outages to problems with Postgres and Cassandra servers deployed on Elastic Block Storage (EBS), a service offered by Amazon Web Services. Reddit said EBS servers in a single U.S. availability zone for AWS experienced performance problems.

It will be interesting to watch as more stories become public of those who are moving out of AWS. Where are companies moving to? Many big players are going straight to wholesale space. Some are going to Softlayer where they can get get dedicated hardware. Keep in mind the hot start-ups like Reddit most of time have their code written to scale on multi-processor servers and utilize the hardware capabilities without virtualization.

If you don’t need virtualization why go to the cloud?

There is a good reason why Amazon doesn’t rent out dedicated hardware. Do you know why?